I want this to be a small book, a small, slight book, easy to carry, the sort of book you would tuck in at the last minute to read on a plane. I laughed out loud when I read this; only Margaret Atwood would have the deadpannery to place a poem called Small Book on page 520 of such a big one.
Paper Boat unfolds across more than six decades, collecting some of her earliest published work she began as a poet and sampling all 14 of her collections so far.
The first will never not be near-terrifying and simultaneously strangely freeing in its viscerality, its acid bite. The latter is so moving and expansive about love and loss that out of its wryness, its gravitas and its deep sadness blooms something far beyond the word moving.
What a book of magic Paper Boat is, huge but somehow still unassuming, perhaps because of its steady-eyed passage through a history and a life, its open continuance, even though so many of its poems deal directly with how momentary we are.
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